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Friday, August 5, 2011

Once Bitten, Twice Shy

I haven't posted a lot recently because things were quite busy when Cerinthus came to visit and unfortunately I caught some kind of horrible cold. On the other hand, my spider bite is healing rather nicely.

I am going to spend this weekend doing translation and studying for my German quiz. I am finding German easier after 7 weeks of class than I did at the beginning, but it is still a little troublesome. The problem that I have with German is that it seems to be in the no-man's land between an inflected language (a language with endings or inflections that indicate the part of speech) and a word-order language (where word order and prepositions determine the part of speech). In my experience of German, articles and adjectives have inflection, but nouns hardly change at all. Furthermore, word order is totally bizarre. Groups of words are often stuck together in chunks (e.g. a subject or object and a genitive phrase indicating possession) but these chunks can appear almost anywhere in the sentence. Perhaps it is just that my book focuses on reading instead of composition, but it baffles me how anyone actually speaks this language because the rules seem to be mystical rather than concrete. Maybe I'll get the hang of it at some point, but I don't think I'll ever be able to understand where German places its commas.

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